Ziraat Times: Srinagar's Newspaper for Agriculture, Business and the J&K Economy
Ziraat Times is a newspaper published from Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, founded by Arjimand Hussain Talib. Its very name announces its mission: ziraat is the Urdu word for agriculture or cultivation, and the paper was founded to cover business, economy, agriculture and current affairs in a region where farming and horticulture sustain the majority of livelihoods yet historically received only a fraction of the press attention given to politics and security. From its base at TP House, Peace Colony, on the Srinagar–Yusmarg Road, Ziraat Times has grown into a full news operation whose website organises coverage around the J&K economy, agricultural economy, business, banking and finance, development and editorial opinion — while also publishing an Urdu section that keeps faith with its name and its original readership.
A Name That Is a Mission Statement
Most newspapers choose names suggesting speed, light or truth. Ziraat Times chose a crop field. The title signals to every reader, before a single page is opened, that the productive economy — orchards, farms, trade, credit and enterprise — is this paper's home ground. That positioning filled a genuine gap. Kashmir's press tradition, which stretches from the Urdu weekly Hamdard of 1935 and the daily Aftab of 1958 through a spurt of dailies after 1990, has been dominated by political reporting, for understandable reasons in a contested region. A Srinagar title devoted systematically to agriculture and business was therefore a distinctive entrant, and the paper's founder has been publicly identified with the argument that the valley's future depends on returning strength to its agriculture-based economy rather than deepening dependence on subsidies and imports.
Founder Arjimand Hussain Talib
The founder of Ziraat Times is Arjimand Hussain Talib, an economic commentator whose interventions on Kashmir's trade and farming crises have been quoted well beyond his own pages. In one widely reprinted assessment, the retired senior civil servant Mohammad Ashraf, a former Director General of Tourism in Jammu and Kashmir, cited Talib's warning that Kashmir's economy was dying silently, with far-reaching long-term consequences, and endorsed the remedy Talib's paper had taken up: a return to an agriculture-based economy, supported by dependable access to outside markets. Ashraf described the Ziraat Times initiative as a private and enterprising effort that civil society should encourage and multiply. That early endorsement from a figure of the old administrative establishment captures the paper's intended role — not merely to report the economy, but to campaign for its productive revival.
What the Paper Covers: Economy First
The structure of the paper's website reads like an economic map of Jammu and Kashmir. Its sections include the J&K Economy; an Agri Economy desk divided into J&K Agriculture and India Agriculture; a business desk spanning Tourism, J&K Business and National Business; a Banking and Finance section, in which the dominant position of J&K Bank in the region's financial life receives sustained attention; and sections for National news and J&K current affairs that keep the paper in the general news flow. Development coverage is subdivided into Education, Environment, Technology and Healthcare. A dedicated Farmers in News strand keeps individual cultivators visible inside the policy coverage. This architecture distinguishes Ziraat Times from general Srinagar dailies: the economy is not a page inside the paper; it is the frame through which the rest of the news is presented.
Agriculture and Horticulture at the Centre
The paper's agricultural focus corresponds to the structure of the economy it covers. Horticulture — above all apples, along with walnuts, almonds, saffron and cherries — and field agriculture employ, directly and indirectly, the great majority of Kashmir's working population, and the sector's recurring crises structure the paper's agenda: highway closures that strand fruit trucks, disputes over cold-storage schedules and charges, the impact of free-trade agreements on apple growers, weather damage to orchards, and the search for crop insurance, credit and better market access. Ziraat Times covers these questions as first-order news, carrying, for example, the concerns of hill-state horticulture bodies engaging the central government over safeguarding apple farmers against import tariff concessions. For growers, traders and the businesses that finance and transport the harvest, that specialisation makes the paper a trade journal as much as a general newspaper.
Editorial Voice and Explainers
Alongside reporting, the paper maintains an active editorial and opinion apparatus: a daily Editorial, an Opinion section with named Articles and Columnists, and a habit of publishing explainers that walk readers through policy changes — how a shift from the New Pension Scheme back toward the Old Pension Scheme would work for J&K government employees, or what changes for banks and customers under new banking legislation. Its editorials address practical governance questions in the same spirit, from carbon credits as a new opportunity for J&K to plantation rules on the region's highways and the stipends of medical interns. Its columnists take up subjects from civil-service preparation to the hidden economics of the power sector and earthquake preparedness in the valley — analysis pitched at readers who administer, trade in, farm or study the region rather than merely observe its politics.
An Urdu Section and a Bilingual Readership
The paper's Urdu section, headed in Urdu script with the paper's name, carries agriculture and public-life stories in the language that remains the valley's most widely read. Items there have addressed, among other subjects, appeals by cold-store and growers' bodies over fruit-storage schedules, the encouraging rise in Kashmir's garlic production, protection of Srinagar's green spaces, paddy transplantation continuing despite heat and water scarcity, a soil-saving campaign for the region's farms, and farmers' expectations from revised support prices for kharif crops. Publishing this material in Urdu is not a courtesy translation programme; it places the paper's core economic journalism in the hands of the farming readership it was founded to serve, in the script and language that readership uses, while the English edition reaches officials, businesses and the diaspora.
Reporting the Region Day to Day
For all its specialisation, Ziraat Times functions as a working news desk for the whole region. Its latest-news flow carries the daily traffic of Jammu and Kashmir public life: government orders and court-driven decisions, postings and assumptions of office by senior officials, tourism arrival figures for Ladakh as well as the valley, education and health-sector representations, and statements by the Chief Minister and ministers. Its bylines and desk credits — Ziraat Times News Desk and Ziraat Times Team Report — appear on stories datelined Srinagar, Jammu and New Delhi, and its top-news selection ranges to global economic reporting, such as United Nations findings on world poverty. The special stories strand includes its own analytical reporting on subjects like the five-year rise of J&K Bank's stock-market value, written for the region's investors and depositors. Readers thus encounter the paper not as an occasional journal but as a daily habit.
Place in the Kashmir Press
Srinagar sustains a dense newspaper culture out of proportion to the valley's size — Urdu, English and bilingual titles, old houses and new entrants, publishing through decades of turbulence that have repeatedly tested the valley's press. Within that culture, Ziraat Times occupies the economic niche. Where the leading dailies define themselves by political coverage and the Urdu press by its literary and political traditions, Ziraat Times defines itself by production: by the orchard, the mandi, the bank branch and the small enterprise. Its premises on the Srinagar–Yusmarg Road place it on the route toward the valley's own agricultural hinterland, an apt address for a paper whose founder argues that Kashmir's bleeding economy — his phrase, amplified by commentators — can only be staunched by rebuilding what the land itself produces.
Why Ziraat Times Matters
Ziraat Times matters because it institutionalised an argument. Founded by Arjimand Hussain Talib in Srinagar, it took the position that agriculture and enterprise deserved a newspaper of their own in Jammu and Kashmir, and it has held that position while expanding into a comprehensive digital news operation covering the economy, banking, business, development and everyday current affairs in English and Urdu. Its sections for farmers, its horticulture advocacy, its explainers for employees and investors, and its editorial attention to the practical economics of mountain life give it a readership — growers, traders, officials, students and the diaspora — that general newspapers reach only incidentally. In a media landscape where the region is usually narrated through conflict, Ziraat Times insists on narrating it through work.
